Mumford & Sons and the Death of Church Music

Mumford and his band connect with a different lineage, an approach that honors music’s ability to unite and create an aura of ennoblement. It’s long proven powerful with audiences and highly problematic for certain music listeners I’d cautiously call elites — people like me, who write about music for a living, or others who’ve built lives around a particular rock ‘n’ roll code.

… to deny that widely shared notions of being good and strong and fulfilled — the things Marcus Mumford sings about — don’t have power is to dismiss a lot of what lives in people’s hearts. Some might cringe at the banality of it all; others will celebrate the common chord this band strikes and call it extraordinary. Neither response fully recognizes that the prosaic nature of this music is the point. Mumford & Sons aren’t changing the world that much, but they’re living loud in their little corner.

It’s an extremely good essay and a provocative theory, but Powers misses a few things. First, it’s a mistake to leave out the obvious disjuncture between Mumford and Sons’ down-home earnestness–which is a sham anyway, Marcus Mumford went to Kings College School–and the fact that the band tours the world and sells millions of albums distributed by Sony (in this country). It’s a Marxist-style critique, but who cares. Playing a banjo onstage at the Grammys is different than playing it on a porch in Kentucky.

Second, there’s a word that ought to appear that doesn’t. That word is Protestant. Mumford and Sons’ soul-baring emotionalism is quintessentially Protestant, and to me it seems like the strongest link between the two things Powers is talking about.

There’s a danger in arguments like this one to elevate certain music simply because it tickles the heartstrings of the people who listen to it. I’m of the mind that it’s better to be an outright elitist than to patronizingly defend bad music on the grounds that some people just don’t know any better. Vice has advanced the thesis that Mumford & Sons is mediocre music for mediocre people, which is at least consistent. But there’s no reason why ordinary people should be attracted to “prosaic” music, to claim that this is somehow natural is extremely unfair. Nor has folk music always been banal–in fact it used to be a lot more fun. What Mumford has discovered, along with his masters at Universal, is that this goopy, self-serious emotionalism sells like crazy. And since he apparently has no interest in new musical ideas, you end up with a relentlessly monotonous body of work that amounts to more of a brand than an oeuvre.

Many contemporary Christian musicians have discovered a similar formula. Consider how differently Christian rock functions from church music in the past. Megastars today supply a corpus of interchangeable–with both secular pop and other church music–worship songs. Bach thought he was exploring the mind of God. There was once a sense of aspiration or striving, through which God was glorified; this stuff is so incredibly lazy it almost seems idolatrous. My favorite example is the promiscuous key changes that arrangers sometimes insert for a cheap thrill that, in more expressive congregations, gets people to raise their hands. I think that’s a pretty good synecdoche for the music as a whole. There’s a risk that it rests entirely on a set of musical and lyrical techniques that are nothing but levers to elicit a certain feeling or response. It’s all heart and no head.

As a listener I can only speak for myself, but I find that more challenging music can better communicate the sense of wonder and awe appropriate to a religious setting. If I want to sing a bunch of stale, bland pop songs, I’ll have a campfire, not go to church. That probably puts me in the minority, but there must be others. And I worry about the cumulative impact of always choosing the lowest common denominator of music as a medium of worship. It drives people like me to get their kicks elsewhere, and it sets your average churchgoer into a pattern of expecting emotional feedback from worship, which isn’t the point.

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37 Responses to Mumford & Sons and the Death of Church Music

I worry about the cumulative impact of always choosing the lowest common denominator of music as a medium of worship.

Mr. Bloom, I come at this from a different angle, and though I disagree with you somewhat I do understand your complaint.

The other side of that coin, logically, is that a steady diet of “more challenging music” will lead to the same exclusionary results.

Some sort of mix is in order, in my opinion. My passion and experience in folk music is eastern Europe (mostly the Balkans), and one thing I find most attractive about it is the mix of simple and easily accessible (the story lines come from a short list) and challenging (the odd meters, the use of a drone, the close dissonance of some harmonies and the ubiquitous vocal focus on the upper chest).

If you are interested, explore recordings from the work of Philip Koutev, who formed and lead the Bulgarian National Folk Ensemble for many years. His orchestrations rival the works of Bartok and Kodaly, and his simple and straight presentations of village songs (and dances!) mix together in (for me) breathtaking ways. You may already be familiar with Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares; that is his musical god-child.

It is the banalization of “religion” so common in America–and perhaps the reason it has survived so well in this secular age. It hardly deserves to be called religion at all; there’s nothing really sacred about it: it’s simply another show which has, if anything, a moralizing and communitary function.

Marcus Mumford’s father, John Mumford, is the National Director of the Vineyard Churches in the UK and Ireland. However, his ordination was in the Church of England, and he even served for a time as a country curate.

It says a very great deal that he has just been made Canon Theologian of Coventry Cathedral: the dear old institutional C of E, and the Anglicans who went all John Wimber and that sort of thing in the 1980s, seem to be meeting in the middle in late middle age.

So, Ms. Powers – NPR’s music critic, no less – likes Tori Amos (wrote a book about her!) but thinks Mumford & Sons too earnest and musically trite? Appeals too much to the critically daft masses? Says that he’s not an outsider because he’s a preacher’s kid who went to expensive schools and married Carrie Mulligan?

How many rockstars are preachers kids? How many attended expensive schools? How many have married movie stars? How is that relevant to criticism of their music, as music? It’s not, except that hipsters don’t listen to music because of how good it is, but because of how superciliously cool it makes them feel.

Just so. Predictably, Powers prefers “outsider personalities and transgressive acts” and “really engaging with what this “normal” represents” to anything that affirms the longing of the human heart for any hint of religious transcendence.

She wants us to “examine what’s conventional — to question whether, for example, these mostly white male artists really can speak for a broad audience and to point out that there’s a lot of baggage attached to Christian-based definitions of morality.”

This is all just way too rich. I wonder if Ms. Powers is still secretly rankled about REM selling out. Betchya she is.

Look. I get the criticism, and partly agree with it. But everything she says can be applied to acts like Ben Folds and other hipster acts. Only difference is that M&S has the added unforgivable gall to drop words like “grace” and bald biblical references into their songs. And that is offensive to Powers’ (and probably your) more finely tuned, Nietzchean hipster aesthetic.

Christianity, how déclassé! She digs Rimbaud, so she can’t possibly like anything that earnestly smacks in any way of Jesus. Just not done. None of her friends from back at RISD or NYU or Berkeley or wherever would return her calls of she did.

Very amusing. This chick, she’s her own parody.

M&S is almost as good in it’s own way as U2. They’re better than Collective Soul, who had the same sort of gig relative grunge that M&S do hipster folk. I’d say that I actually prefer M&S to any major grunge band, because lets be honest here, “Daughter” and all that was pretty cheesy crap too. It just had nothing to do with Jesus, so everyone could feel really hip and nihilistic and morally superior when listening to it, and watching Eddie Vedder write “Prochoice” in blacktip marker in an agony of angst on MTV Live.

But that’s really your problem, isn’t it? You want to be all rive gauche et nouveau vague, a true nihilistic aesthete, and M&S is just pissing on your sensibilities. I feel for you man. That sucks. Really does.

I mean, what’s the difference between Gordon Gano and Mumford? Gano is a preacher’s son, describes himself as a devout baptist and sings about Christ a lot. I’d say that his and the Violet Femmes’ ouvre works a lot better as pop music, and is on that level “better” and more accessible. What makes the Femmes more critically applauded though isn’t the quality of their music, but their toying with androgyny, their singing about masturbation and telling everyone to kiss off. SPIN and Rolling Stone luv themselves their punk aesthetic. Makes ‘em all feel rebellious and such. That’s what makes the Femmes acceptable where Mumford is not. And that’s all.

I don’t think the dichotomy of emotional and complex music is the correct one. Complex music can certainly be emotionally moving if one is familiar with it. Speaking personally, I tend to find the hymns in a high church Episcopalian service more moving than the music in a contemporary evangelical service, and I find the liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox service more emotional still.

The issue is more about the breadth of the emotions involved. Evangelical services only tend to have two modes: praise and “let’s slow it down now” pseudo-solemnity. Liturgical churches on the other hand tend to move through a broader emotional range, from the real sorrow of the Passion to the joy of Easter, for example.

Perfect description, “goopy, self-serious emotionalism.” I’ve always felt that Mumford and Sons is carrying on the tradition of Dave Mathews Band, bland rock for people who don’t really listen to music.

The Mumfords’ songs have drive, celebration, confidence, and yes, fun. Brits love their Americana, and Mumford is not different on that score than dozens of other Brits I can name, except that he actually *does* stand partly in the Vineyard-church tradition where many *pretend* to stand in the black-gospel tradition.

I frankly like a few tracks, including ‘Babel’, but find most songs sound like others. That’s terribly common among hugely successful pop stars – their followups tend to sound like their first hit. Nothing new there, and probably true of many of your favorite artists and mine. I don’t think the Mumford formula will hold up as well as Bacharach or Diamond (or, for the more Americana-oriented, Emmylou Harris or Johnny Cash) all of whom are essentially formulaic, but eventually over time created a varied tapestry of special work. But I could be wrong.

The real ‘cutting edge’, for Christians, is the telling of (as T Bone Burnett put it) ‘the wild truth’. Like it or not, Jesus doesn’t just speak to the truth, He is in the thick of it. The question you have to ask yourself is not ‘is it somewhat of a formula’, but ‘how true is it’. The truth in Mumford’s music is not like a Cash, Cockburn, U2 or Emmylou, bbut it *is* there, and should be acknowledged and cherished for what it is rather than panned as declassè or shallow. It rather meets people where they are not whre you wish they’d be. That’s what makes it ‘popular’ music. And I love popular music.

We recently left a PCA church that uses excellent classic hymnody, where abrasive hyper-reformed/TeaParty types took over. For reasons of intra-family politics, we now attend a church with hipster music like this. Good grief how I dislike it, and can’t understand why anyone does.

Ann Powers writes: “That code values outsider personalities and transgressive acts over the far more common human quest to fit in with conventional society. It’s grounded in the real, powerful legacy of popular music as a forum for otherwise unheard voices: African-Americans through jazz, the blues and, later, hip-hop (and really, through most all pop music)”

What year is it, anyway? How long has hip-hop been on the radio? I heard “Rapper’s Delight” on a Top 40 AM station in the 1970s and said, “Wow, this is a catchy novelty numbers. I bet we’ll be similar novelty tunes for 12, maybe 18 months before everybody gets sick of them forever.”

Instead, it’s the 2010s and rap is still around. It’s like if variations on a “A Boy Named Sue” made up 50% of all the new songs coming out of Nashville.

The purpose of worship as part of the Christian faith is the communion of the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, with her Lord. Emotion, feelings, intellectual stimulation, etc., are all byproducts of the members of the Body communing with their Lord but they are not the purpose of that communion. Among other things, communion is celebration; however, celebration is not entertainment, although modernity often conflates the two. This music which has crept into the Church is the liturgy of another which carries its own message. That message is still there no matter how much the music has been “Jesufied.” Early on in the “Christian” pop scene there was a singer which said and I believe a song which stated, “Why should the devil have all of the good music?” Well, the answer is that no music from the devil is good, for all good and perfect gives, including good music, are of and from our Lord; therefore, music which the devil has had a claim on has no place in the communion of the saints as they celebrate with their Lord.

I have to agree that Mumford’s arrangements are distinctly protestant. I was having this conversation with my wife because we greatly enjoy his music, but she is agnostic and I am . . . well. . . not Christian. The religious imagery goes over her head but irks me somewhat. It’s a shame, too, because I enjoy his music.

I think you are leaving out a major aspect of his appeal–its ethnic quality. His music is not just neo-folk, it’s celtic folk. A less-punk version of flogging molly. Those like myself who enjoy this type of music will naturally be drawn to it.

The musical interludes, while lacking sophistication as you pointed out, often give the feel of an jam session by a lively pub fireplace. This is a huge part of the Irish musical tradition. The slower songs have that plaintive quality that is also part of the tradition. As a big fan of celtic music from the likes of Johnny Flynn (with whom Mumford has collaberated), I can’t help but tap my foot and sing along.

If there’s a particular ethnicity with which you identify, you can understand. If not, it may be hard to find that draw. But I firmly believe it plays a part in Mumford’s popularity.

“Bach thought he was exploring the mind of God. There was once a sense of aspiration or striving, through which God was glorified” You’ve put your finger right on the heart of it, I think. Great music represents a multigenerational enterprise of exploration, in very much the way that scientific research is a multigenerational enterprise of exploration. A living religious tradition, also, is a multigenerational enterprise of exploration. So a house of worship where music is used not to initiate a congregation into such an enterprise, but to manipulate an audience by cheap and easy emotional triggers, or to appease a crowd’s phobia of silence, is hoisting the white flag of surrender.

@Steve S: “Instead, it’s the 2010s and rap is still around. It’s like if variations on a “A Boy Named Sue” made up 50% of all the new songs coming out of Nashville.” I’d say it’s more like a situation where 50% of all new songs are variations on “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?,” or “I Don’t Want Her, You Can Have Her, She’s Too Fat for Me,” but I certainly take your point.

Let’s remember this is pop music. IMHO there’s better pop and worse pop — M&S is alright, I guess, but if I’m going to go for consciously derivative Christian musicians I’d rather go with somebody like Belle and Sebastian who know a thing or two about arrangements and writing lyrics that don’t need to be so trite to be moving. Or Sufjan Stevens, the Christian folk artist that hipsters actually do look up to because the depth is in his music, not just his words (which don’t drip with overt references anyway). I’ve never seen anybody struggle with either artists’ Christianity too much.

The problem with M&S isn’t that they’re derivative or sappy or spiritual (heh), but that they’re trying to pretend they’re not simply a rock band because they’re playing different instruments. These songs could easily be Green Day songs if you ask me. That’s why they get radio play, that’s where the formula comes in.

There’s nothing wrong with popular, accessible music (even formulaic music), but good art works on multiple levels and you should bring something for everybody. Whatever else hipsters are guilty of, they have good ears, and when they shut up and listen they do steer one right much of the time. Then they open their mouths and it all goes to crap. That goes double — no, triple — for music writers. Recorded music should have been the end of music journalism, by God.

Having “grown up” with the Methodist Hymnal (I own 4 of various incarnations, though I can neither sing on key or play any instrumenrt), I search for a congregation that still uses its beautiful music & organ (sometimes piano) accompaniment (OK–an occasional young person & her guitar is alright)to augment its worship, while also preaching far to the left of the Tea Party. Any congregation (not just Methodist) that has what now seems to be called “traditional” (musically) services would be lovely. I cannot even find vocal renditions of favorites at Amazon or iTunes. Regrettably, living in the South (SC), I have been seriously hampered in finding such a situation. Please help!

“They’re better than Collective Soul.” The very definition of damning with faint praise. I agree with your takedown of Ms. Powers. Pop music criticism is mostly self indulgent wanting. It’s done well so incredibly rarely. As for Mumford and Sons, zzzzzzzz. You can get by knowing a couple chords if you’re playing guitar, but if you’re playing banjo, you better light that sucker up like Earl Scruggs, and if you’re playing a mandolin, you better play like Sam Bush or I’m going to get bored quickly.

“As a listener I can only speak for myself, but I find that more challenging music can better communicate the sense of wonder and awe appropriate to a religious setting. If I want to sing a bunch of stale, bland pop songs, I’ll have a campfire, not go to church. That probably puts me in the minority, but there must be others.”
You are not alone. I despise christian contemporary (CCM) church music for every reason you give and more…(and I’m under the age of 40)

I really don’t “get” the purpose of music criticism. I understand why to write reviews of movies…it might save you a few bucks or a couple if wasted hours. But with Pandora and YouTube, anyone can listen for all of five minutes or so and decide “hey, I liked that” or “that sucked.” Who really needs someone to tell them “you shouldn’t like this music, and if you do, you suck” or “you really ought to like this, and if you don’t, you suck.”

Oh, and Bach? He was a genius. I don’t expect many of them to arise every generation. So if someone doesn’t compare to JS Bach, join the club. The music at one’s Church will likely be average and banal because let’s face it–we are mostly that way.

Except for pretentious music critics, of course. They can smirk at the rest of us who actually enjoy it.

Charles C. is grinding an axe (and quite and old one at that–Nietzsche, really?) rather than honestly engaging Powers’ argument. Powers explicitly references contemporary acts with christian influences and sensibilities. The difference between these and Mumford and Sons is they don’t suck.

He suggestion that “hipsters don’t listen to music because of how good it is good but because of how superciliously it makes them feel” is shallow and lazy caricature.

If you look at what is on my iPod, you will find Bach, Rutter, Messiaen and The Avett Brothers…North Carolina farm boys who sing some sappy tunes in brotherly harmony but who also address themes such as human finitude, suffering, place and love.

Excellence, as well as banality, can be found in any genre. I don’t understand musical snobbery; those who turn up their noses at high church music are just as snobby as those who look down from their lofty classical perches on contemporary or southern gospel, etc. Personally, I don’t much care for the Mumford stuff. The endless repetition of the same musical phrase sets my teeth on edge, but for some reason I don’t understand, an entire genre of church music has embraced this technique.

But, if God uses this or any other musical offering to bring people into worship thereby changing their lives, then have at it. Soli Deo Gloria.

If you try too much to correct the church’s decline in musical taste, you’re going to get labeled a “Pharisee”. Been there, done that.

But it’s not so much a decline in taste as it’s a misdirection in purpose. Today, it is thought that the purpose of music in church is to please people, but it ought be designed to please God, not man. And God, being primarily a Rational Being, and not so much given to emotional whims, I think may not be pleased with all the “goopy” stuff.

I have been a church musician my whole life. Started singing hymns with my mother and sister when I was 8 yrs. old in harmony. I have a master’s degree and some doctoral credits in voice performance. Any church that hands its music program over to a band or group is going to have trouble unless you are a vineyard church or fall into that category. The best way to manage church music is to have a person(s) who has had a music education and understands the history of church music. Then bring the wealth of that knowledge to bear upon the worship service. Blending the various styles should depend upon message and how your church members understand that message. It may need to be 100% classical. It may be 10% contemporary and 90% classical and so on to 50-50% etc. But that can be worked out to the joy and delight of all members. But there needs to be dialogue and agreement. Nothing more obnoxious or worse than a praise band ignoring the congregation, and singing with gusto a song that no one else but them can understand. To do so is just nonsensical. It defies reason, and does not have to be so. Do not alienate your own congregation by pushing alien forms of music that to the congregation seems like a foreign language to worship in. Use some common sense. It is really not about complexity vs. simplicity. Perhaps the writer means classical vs. contemporary, but some classical church music is simple and very affective. I would recommend any book written by Dr. Harold Best, former dean of the music conservatory at Wheaton College (a Christian College) for a better understanding of worship music. Because I have to say it is amusing to read posts of non-musicians discussing music styles when they have no knowledge of music theory. Dr. Best is very practical and easy to read.

This is the kind of rhetoric that makes people want to go to a Mumford and Sons concert instead of going to church. There’s something attractive about a group of friends who love to make music together. There’s something fun about watching a group of friends making music together. If Bach and Mozart were alive today, they would be Mumford and Sons fans.

Did they ever play Bach at your church? At my church as a child, we sang execrable hymns written in the mid-1800′s. I disliked them. They were dull and boring and sounded anything but joyous or uplifting. And always accompanied by a clunky pipe organ.

I have no doubt that Jesus’ followers would cover their ears if they heard either “How Great Thou Art” or a contemporary Christian song. Or maybe even Bach.

I found myself utterly bored by their second album, but their first struck a chord with me. I found that listening through the entire first album was incredibly cathartic. Those pulsing rhythms and switching of emotional notes were absorbing.

Your point about the brand vs. oeuvre is good, but doesn’t give enough credit to brands. Having a musical brand is like writing genre fiction–it delivers the goods and occasionally lets loose something really great.

The other place that M&S’s music might shine (I wouldn’t know) is in concert. I loved Jamie Cullum’s first two albums when they came out, but his later work was dull and rehashed, and yet he remained thrilling and inventive in concert.

Coming at the from an Eastern Orthodox viewpoint, I presuppose an organized liturgical service and expect “church music” to fit such a service. We also have a lot of non-liturgical or paraliturgical isometric hymns, which would be more accessible to Protestant and now Roman Catholic folks, but you don’t hear them in America as much as in the various “Old Countries,” because it’s hard to translate the text with any faithfulness, make the words sound natural in English, and keep the metrical structure of the original.

I can’t imagine that the current vogue for “praise songs” really fulfills the function of traditional hymnody, although that does not mean that something of the sort has no legitimate function. Oral traditional hymnody is often moving and melodically interesting; a lot of current stuff, but not all, is soporific, to judge from what I have heard (which admittedly is not a huge sample). And of course one sometimes has doctrinal reservations about the text.

I particularly like the stuff that makes the hair rise on the back on your neck–a number of the old shape-note hymns and the lining-out singing. I can imagine something similar in an Orthodox church. But most Protestants don’t know that these genres exist.